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I Started Falling Asleep on My Own Couch at Seven O'Clock. I'm 56. I Want to Tell You What I Finally Tried. I am writing this for the woman or the man in their fifties or their sixties who has started canceling things. Who has started saying "I think I'll pass" to the dinner with friends, the Saturday concert, the weekend trip to see the grandkids. Who has started telling themselves they are just tired, and tired is normal, and they earned the right to be tired, and maybe they should just accept that this is what their fifties and sixties are going to be. I want to tell you what I tried. Because I was that person for a long time. I am fifty-six years old. I am a contractor. I have been building and remodeling houses in the same county for thirty-one years. I have framed walls. I have set tile. I have hung cabinets in two thousand kitchens. I have crawled under five hundred porches looking for what was wrong with them. I have always been a physical guy. I have always been the guy on the crew who could outwork men twenty years younger. That is the part of the story you need to know. Because what happened to me starting around fifty-three made no sense to me, given who I had been for the first fifty-two years of my life. It started small. I would get home from a Tuesday on a job site — a normal Tuesday, not even a hard one — and I would sit down on the couch to take my boots off, and I would still be sitting on the couch with one boot off and one boot on forty-five minutes later. Not asleep. Not exactly. Just — gone. Sitting there. Not registering that any time had passed. My wife would come in from the kitchen and say "honey, are you alright" and I would jump like she had startled me out of a dream. This started happening once a week. Then twice. Then three times. By the time I was fifty-four, I was getting home from work, sitting down on the couch, and being unable to get back up off it for the rest of the evening. I would tell my wife I was going to shower in a minute. I would not shower. I would sit on that couch from five thirty until ten o'clock at night with the TV on and not remember half of what I had watched. I would drag myself up to bed at ten. I would sleep nine hours. I would wake up at six the next morning feeling like I had run a marathon in my sleep. I would do it again. I started canceling things. This is the part that I think a lot of people my age recognize. A buddy would text me about going to the Friday night high school football game like we had been doing every fall for fifteen years. I would tell him I had a thing. I did not have a thing. I had a couch and a TV and a five thirty to ten o'clock blackout. My wife would suggest a weekend trip to see our daughter and the grandkids three hours away. I would tell her maybe next month. Maybe next month became maybe next quarter. Maybe next quarter became maybe in the spring. Maybe in the spring became we never went. Our daughter started bringing the grandkids to us. I think she understood. She did not say anything. But she stopped asking us to come visit. That hurt more than I knew how to admit. I told my wife it was because driving three hours was a lot. I told her it was because the guest room at our daughter's house was hard on my back. I told her it was because of the dogs. My wife knew it was none of those things. She did not push. I will say that about her. She did not push. She just quietly carried it, the way wives do, and waited for me to notice what I had been doing to our life. I went to my doctor about it. Twice in three years. I have a doctor I have been seeing since I was forty-one. Dr. Marsh. A guy about my age. We talk about football. He has known me for fifteen years. I told him both times what was happening. The couch. The blackouts. The canceling. He took it seriously both times. He ran every test you can run. The full bloodwork. The thyroid. The B12. The iron. The vitamin D. The testosterone. The sleep study where they wire you up at the hospital and watch you try to sleep in a strange bed for one night. Everything came back fine. Dr. Marsh sat me down both times after the results came back. He was honest with me. He said: "Steve. I cannot find anything wrong with you. Your numbers are good. Your sleep architecture on the study was fine. There is no medical explanation for what you are describing that I can see." He said: "Sometimes this happens to guys our age. The body changes. The recovery from a day of physical work is different at fifty-five than it was at thirty-five. You are still doing the work of a thirty-five-year-old on a sixteen-hour day in the summer heat. Maybe you need to think about scaling back." He was not being dismissive. He was telling me what he honestly thought. I went home both times and tried to scale back. I started taking Mondays off. I started leaving job sites at three instead of five. The couch did not move. I would get home at three thirty on a Tuesday and be on the couch in a five thirty blackout anyway. It was not about how long the day was. It was about something else. I did not know what it was. I had stopped going back to the doctor about it. The night I decided to do something else was a Saturday in May. It was my daughter's husband's fortieth birthday. They had thrown a party at their house, three hours away. About forty people. A keg in the backyard. A bouncy house for the kids. The kind of party where you stay until midnight if you are having a good time. I had driven up with my wife on Friday night. We were staying through Sunday morning. The party started at three. I made it to seven thirty. At seven thirty I told my daughter I needed to lie down for a few minutes. I went into the guest room. I lay down on the bed in my clothes. I woke up at eleven at night to the sound of the party winding down outside the window. I had missed almost four hours of my son-in-law's fortieth birthday party because I had laid down on a bed for a few minutes at seven thirty. I came out of the guest room. My wife was helping clean up paper plates in the backyard. My daughter was putting the last of the kids to bed. My son-in-law was on the back porch with two of his college buddies, beers in hand, telling stories. I walked out onto the back porch. My son-in-law turned around and said: "Hey, Steve. You feeling okay?" There was no edge in his voice. He was being kind. I said: "Yeah, Will. Just needed a minute." He patted my shoulder. He handed me a beer. He went back to his story. I sat on the porch with my son-in-law and his college buddies until midnight. But I sat there knowing that I had just missed four hours of an event that was important to a man my daughter loved. And I had missed it because I could not stay upright after seven thirty in the evening. I drove home Sunday morning with my wife and I did not talk for the first hour. When I finally did talk, I said: "I'm going to do something about this." She said: "Okay, honey. What are you going to do?" I said: "I do not know yet. But I am not going to keep doing what I have been doing." I am going to skip the part where I spent the next three weeks reading. I am a contractor. I am not a guy who reads about supplements. I am a guy who reads framing manuals and code books. But I had run out of other ideas. What I was looking for was a layer of support that my doctor had not been able to give me through the standard tests. Not a treatment for anything. Not a cure for anything. Just one more thing to add to the pile. What I kept reading about was the body's natural cellular energy and the body's natural antioxidant balance. This was the layer that Dr. Marsh had told me he did not have a clinical tool for. It was the layer that, the more I read, seemed to be the layer that quietly diminishes for a lot of people in their fifties, not because something is broken, but because the body that used to recover from a day of hard work on its own at thirty stops recovering from it the same way at fifty-five. The most researched ingredient I kept seeing in that category was beetroot. Not the smoothie beetroot. Not the trendy version. The actual plant. Beetroot has been studied for decades for cardiovascular wellness and the body's natural energy support. The active compound — the betalains, the deep crimson pigment in the root — supports the body's natural antioxidant balance and supports the body's natural cellular energy. The research did not promise anything dramatic. It described a layer of support. Which was exactly what I had been looking for. I had bought beetroot powder once before. About four years ago. I had stirred it into a smoothie for two weeks and then forgotten about it. What I learned in the reading is that the active compound in beetroot — the betalains, the pigment — is delicate. It is sensitive to heat. A lot of standard processing methods are fast and hot because that is cheaper and easier. Cold-pressing at low temperatures preserves the betalains in a way that faster, hotter methods do not. I read about a small company called Rosabella. They cold-press their beetroot at low temperatures. I looked at the photographs of their capsules. The capsules were a deep, dark crimson. That color is the betalains. That color is what tells you the active compound made it through the processing intact. I had handled a lot of materials in my line of work. I knew what intact looked like and what processed-and-faded looked like. The photographs of Rosabella's capsules looked right. Before I ordered anything, I called Dr. Marsh's office. I told the nurse I was thinking about adding a beetroot supplement called Rosabella, and I wanted to make sure Dr. Marsh was comfortable with it before I started. The nurse called back the next afternoon. She said: "Dr. Marsh says it is a sensible thing to add. There is good research on antioxidant support for cardiovascular wellness. Add it to what you are already doing. Don't change anything else. Come back in a couple of months and let's see how you are doing." I ordered my first bottle that night. I started taking it the following Monday. Two capsules with a glass of water in the morning. I did not change anything else. I want to tell you what I noticed over the next eight weeks. I am not going to make a claim about what caused what. I am going to tell you what happened in the order it happened. The first two weeks, nothing changed. I am going to be honest with you about that. I was sitting on the couch at six o'clock those first two weeks the same way I had been sitting on the couch at six o'clock for three years. Around week three, I came home from a job site on a Wednesday and instead of sitting down on the couch I went into the kitchen and got a glass of water. I drank the water standing up. I want to tell you that small thing because it had not happened in a long time. I had been getting home and sitting down immediately and not getting back up. Drinking a glass of water standing up at the kitchen counter at six o'clock on a Wednesday was a small thing that I noticed. Around week four, I took a shower before dinner instead of after. I had not taken a shower before dinner on a weekday in two years. I had been showering before bed because I had been too gone to shower any earlier. Around week five, my wife and I went out to dinner with another couple on a Friday night. I had been canceling Friday-night dinners with that couple for about eighteen months. We met them at seven. We sat at the restaurant until nine thirty. We came home. I went to bed at ten thirty. I had not strung together a Friday night like that in a long time. Around week six, I called my buddy who texts me about the high school football games. I told him I wanted to come to the next one. He said: "Steve. I have not stopped texting you for three years. You realize that, right?" I said: "I realize that. I'm sorry." He said: "Don't apologize. Just come." I went. We sat in the stands. We froze. We yelled at the refs. I drove home and I was tired but I was tired the way you are tired after a good thing instead of tired the way you are tired when nothing has happened that day. Around week seven, I called my daughter and told her my wife and I wanted to drive up the next weekend. She was quiet for a second on the phone. Then she said: "Dad. Yeah. Come up." We drove up that Saturday morning. We stayed two nights. I helped my son-in-law put together a swing set he had bought for the kids. We were out in the yard for four hours. I did not need to lie down once. On Sunday night after dinner, I sat on the back porch with my son-in-law and we drank a beer and talked about his job. We sat out there for an hour and a half. I went to bed at ten thirty. I drove home Monday morning with my wife. She looked over at me at one point on the highway. She said: "Steve." I said: "Yeah?" She said: "You're here." I knew exactly what she meant. I said: "I know. I know I am." We did not talk much for the rest of the drive home. We did not need to. I went back to Dr. Marsh at the eight-week mark. He went through the bloodwork. Took my blood pressure. Listened to me describe my last two months. He sat back in his chair. He said: "Steve. Whatever you have been doing, keep doing it. You look like a different guy than the one who sat in that chair four months ago." I told him about the Rosabella. About the high school football game. About the swing set. He nodded. He said: "Good. I'm glad. Keep up with everything you're doing." He did not say anything else. He did not need to. I want to be careful here. I am not a doctor. I am not in any kind of healthcare. I am a contractor. I build houses. I am one fifty-six-year-old guy who spent three years falling asleep on his own couch at seven o'clock and finally got tired of missing his own life. I do not know for certain what the Rosabella did and did not do. I know what I was doing before. I know what I added. I know what has happened over the last few months. I know the timing. I also know I am fifty-six and I am going to keep aging and there will come a day when no supplement will hold back the slow turning of the years. I am not pretending otherwise. What I am telling you is what I tried. What I noticed. What my doctor said about it. That is all. If you are a man — or a woman, this is not just a guy thing — who has been canceling things for years and telling themselves they are just tired, and the test results keep coming back fine, and the people you love have stopped asking you to come because they got tired of hearing no — here is what I would say. Talk to your doctor. Tell them what you are thinking about adding. Get their blessing. Then add it to what you are already doing. Do not subtract anything. Do not change anything else. Give it a few weeks before you decide anything. Bodies are different. Some people notice something shift in the first week or two. For me, it was around three weeks. Others take longer. That is the whole story. P.S. I want to say something about my son-in-law's birthday party. It has been six months since that party. We were back up at their house last weekend. My son-in-law and I were on the back porch on Saturday night. The kids were asleep. Our wives were in the kitchen. He looked over at me at one point. He said: "Steve. I want to tell you something." I said okay. He said: "I noticed at my fortieth that you were having a hard time. I knew you weren't blowing it off. I knew something was up. I didn't know how to ask about it. So I just kept being normal." He paused. He said: "I'm glad you're back, man." I sat there on his back porch for a minute and did not know what to say. I told him thank you. I told him I had been gone for a few years and I knew it. I told him I was sorry I had missed half of his party. He said: "Don't be sorry. Just come to the fiftieth." I said: "I'll be at the fiftieth." I will be. P.P.S. Here is what I would tell you to do if you are thinking about trying it. Check with your doctor or pharmacist first. That is the most important step. Then take two capsules with a glass of water in the morning. Do not change anything else. Just add this. Give it a few weeks before you decide anything. Some people notice something within the first week or two — a little more steadiness at six o'clock, a little less of that wall that hits you at seven, a little more of yourself in the back half of the day. Others take longer. Be patient with your body. P.P.P.S. Rosabella has a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you are not satisfied for any reason, every penny back. No questions asked. That is a sensible policy for a supplement. It gives you time to actually see whether it helps. P.P.P.P.S. Rosabella is a small operation. They harvest and bottle on their own schedule. I keep an extra bottle in the house just in case. My wife started taking it about a month after I did. She called Dr. Marsh first. He said the same thing he said to me. Sensible thing to add. She is fifty-four. She had not been showing the way I had been showing. But she had been quietly tired for a few years. She had not made a big deal of it because she had been busy worrying about me. Last weekend at our daughter's, after the kids were in bed and my son-in-law and I were on the back porch, she was in the kitchen baking cookies with our daughter at ten o'clock at night. I watched them through the window for a minute. The two of them at the counter. Flour on the counter. My wife laughing at something our daughter had said. I have not seen my wife laugh in the kitchen at ten o'clock at night in a long time. I am going to keep showing up for that. That is what I am telling you about. Not the cuff. Not the test. Not the number. Your wife in the kitchen at ten o'clock at night. Your son-in-law on his back porch. Your daughter telling you to come up. The life you have been canceling. Come back to it. https://track.tryrosabella.com/8ae97cac-2146-42d6-af75-de0e59d15644 Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.